Describe the history and evolution of modern computer-based communications systems.

Describe the technical basis of the Internet, its addressing, naming and core protocols.

Brief description

This module gives students a broad understanding of the infrastructure of a personal computer. It addresses basic issues in hardware and operating systems and focuses on commonly available desktop personal computer systems.

Content

1. Elements of a personal computer system – 4 Lectures
Fundamental resources of a personal computer system. Architectural Block Diagram. Interaction through the OS and its interface components. Operating-system: definition and trivial examples of functionality. The Onion Skin Model as a simple view. Everything is a program. The idea of a system call, and the idea of the OS providing services.

4. Filestore, process and task management – 3 Practicals
Introducton to the filesystems and process control facilities of both Microsoft Windows and Unix.

5. Major operating system functionality, files, processes (tasks) and memory management – 5 Lectures
What files are. Reading and writing of files as services provided by the OS. Permissions and file-protection. The trash-can and file recovery. Physical file storage concepts. What is a process? Relationships of files, programs and processes. The OS and its components as processes. Schedulers and what they allow you to do. Multi-threading. Concept of memory contexts and swapping. Difficulties (deadlock concept etc). The idea of interruption. Memory management. Swap-files and usng disk as “extra memory”. Allocation and deallocation of memory as a service provided by the OS. Fragmentation of memory.

6. Unix tools and bash scripting and regular expressions – 6 Practicals
Working efficiently: practical use of the facilities Unix to support common application, computing, administration, and maintenance tasks. When to use script rather than a mouse.